Tag: Science

Everything hinges on

Everything hinges on one key decision.

As you struggle with the profound existential issues that overwhelm the sensitive soul; as you think through what could be the real purpose of your life; as you wonder if there’s a God who could possibly help you; as you resist the temptation to put an end to it all – there is one key decision that confronts you.

You don’t have to go on a long pilgrimage; you don’t have to follow a three-year university course; you don’t have to master some obscure concepts, and you don’t have to pass some test of endurance. 

You have to be humble, open to be taught that the life-philosophy you hold dear may well be wrong. You have to realise that no atheistic worldview can offer you the serious answers you seek. You have to consider not “religion”, but rather God himself, because whether you realise it yet or not, God has demonstrated his existence in coming by a historic incarnation into this world: Jesus Christ is the proof that God exists, and if you do not know that yet, a thoughtful reading of the four Gospels recounting his life, his teaching, his divine claims, his miraculous ministry, his atoning death, and his triumphant resurrection will lead you to conclude that God has indeed sent his divine Son into the world to give us the answers we seek.  Jesus said he “came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19.10); human beings without Christ are lost. He is the key we need to be “saved”.

Jesus is able to save you from your ignorance, for he is “the light of the world” (John 8.12). He is able to reveal to you how much God loves you, for “God so loved the world (including you) that he gave his only Son (Jesus) that whoever (including you) believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3.16). He is able to enter your life by his life-giving Spirit, as if you were born again into a completely wonderful life in relationship with the God who loves you; he is knocking at the door of your heart, eager to come in and forgive all your failures and sins, and renew you in a life that has real meaning and purpose.

Millions the world over have experienced this new life that Jesus gives; it is what corresponds to the deepest needs of our soul. Until we experience this, we are lost, confused and guilty, wandering hopelessly to no apparent purpose. Jesus can heal your inner being; he can save your soul; he can give you new life.

It all hinges on one thing. Surprisingly, one decision, clearly and resolutely taken, can lift you out of the darkness of despair and bring you to the joy of a real, harmonious relationship with God. One decision involving willingness to be made anew. One decision that you will hold to in the days to come. It all hinges on you calling upon the name of Jesus, opening your heart and saying, “Lord Jesus, have mercy on me, the sinner; cleanse me from my sins; make me born again; come into my heart and be my Lord and Saviour; I will follow you with all my heart”.

This prayer of faith and commitment is the key to experiencing God’s loving presence, and proving to yourself that He is real, for he is eager to answer that prayer when it is sincerely prayed. Your wavering and doubting will be over; a relationship with God will begin.

Clive Every-Clayton

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How does God communicate?

The Bible belittles dumb idols made by the hands of men: “they have mouths, but they cannot speak” (Psalm 115.4-7). Normally God should have powers superior to humans’, no? 

Yes – surely if there is a Creator God who has made people capable of speaking, communicating their thoughts in words – shouldn’t God be able to do the same or even better? It is therefore legitimate to ask, has God spoken, and if so, how? And what he says must also be very important.

I once read that expressions such as, “The Lord said…”, “The word of the Lord came…”, “Thus says the Lord…”, “Hear the word of the Lord…”, “the Lord declares…” etc. come about 2,000 times in the Old Testament. As I subsequently read through the Bible, I checked that out, and indeed, including expressions like, “the commandment of the Lord”, I counted about 2,000. Either those were two thousand blasphemous lies, or God is indeed in the business of communicating his word to human beings.

Indeed, right from Genesis chapter 1, the creation of man and woman, God speaks to them. He continues to speak to their children, to Noah, to Abraham and so on for centuries. How exactly in those first years he “spoke” to humans is not made explicit, but that he communicated his will, his plans, his promises, and his orders to those early patriarchs is reasserted very often in the Bible. He even interacted with them as they answered him, and gave them his instructions.

Later on, he called Moses and spoke with him as it were “face to face” (Exodus 33.11). The Ten Commandments were verbally given by God: the list in Exodus 20 begins, “And God spoke all these words, saying…” 

Through this communication of God’s words, the Lord reveals himself. There has been revelation from God, in words we can understand. This brings us the light and truth that we humans, darkened in our thinking, desperately need. We do well to check it out, to meditate on God’s word, and to place our confidence in what our Creator says.

Later on, God spoke to prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, telling them to pass on his words to the people. He says some powerful truths: “I made the earth and created man upon it”; “I am the Lord, and there is no other; besides me there is no God”; “I the Lord speak the truth; I declare what is right” (Isaiah 45, verses 12, 5, 19). So God reveals himself in words that are true: here we have access to divine truth. This is of no small importance!

When Jesus came, he also spoke from God. “God spoke to our fathers by the prophets”, says the New Testament, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Hebrews 1.1-2). “What I say,” Jesus declares, “I say as the Father has told me” (John 12.50). He tells his hearers he is “a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God” (John 8.40). He adds a question pertinent even still in our day: “If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me?” (John 8.46).

Do you want to hear God speaking to you? The place to look is in the Bible. If we never read it, we are closing our eyes and ears to vital truth that God has revealed for our good. God has seen fit to reveal truth and answers that we need to know, that our own thinking and bright philosophy could never discover by ourselves. 

Clive Every-Clayton

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Am I a good person?

What is a good person? How to define what goodness is for a human being? In his ground-breaking, thoroughly reasoned, brilliantly insightful book “After Virtue”, Alasdair MacIntyre clarifies the question with luminous simplicity. Taking as examples how we would assess whether a watch is a good watch or a farmer is a good farmer, he says “we define both ‘watch’ and ‘farmer’ in terms of the purpose or function which a watch or a farmer are typically expected to serve.” A knife or a pen is similarly “good” if they fit the purpose for which they were conceived.

Reflecting on this, I realised that Jesus had taught this principle when he referred to salt. “Salt is good” is one of his words, (Luke 14.34). Its purpose is clearly to provide flavour to food. In the Sermon on the Mount, however, he adds, “but if salt has lost its taste… it is no longer good”; it can’t fulfil its purpose (Matthew 5.13).

Why is our generation so confused about goodness and morality? Why do ethical debates, instead of helpfully defining goodness, end rather in a good mess? Alasdair MacIntyre puts his finger on the deep reason: what’s missing is an understanding of man’s purpose (telos is the word he uses). If a thing is considered good because it fulfils its objective or purpose, the key question is what is the purpose of human beings? If there is no clear answer to that question, it is impossible to judge whether a person is good.

Now if everything in the universe, including our human species, resulted from a powerful explosion without any guiding intelligence and wisdom to provide the purpose of it all, there can be nothing but confusion both as to our meaning and purpose. And lacking understanding of our purpose, there is no means of assessing the goodness or badness of people.

So the secular West’s evacuating the Biblical wisdom of the divine Creator who had in mind a purpose for his creation, and specifically for human beings made “in his image”, is the real cause of our profound confusion. If we do not know what a person if “for”, we cannot say whether or not he is good in accomplishing that purpose. 

So both the meaning and purpose of our human existence, and the criteria of good and bad, depend on knowing why we exist – what is our telos. Back in the 17th century, some serious biblical scholars, reflecting on the essence of Christian truth, posed in the Westminster Shorter Catechism the question, “What is the chief end (telos) of man?” They furnished Christianity with the most brilliant summary answer, unsurpassed in four centuries: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever”. Vital wisdom in 14 words!

The same essential answer was expressed by Stephen Meyer, erudite scientist, biblical Christian, and author of “The Return of the God Hypothesis”. Interviewed by Piers Morgan and asked point blank: “What is the meaning of life?” he responded wonderfully: “To come into a relationship with the Creator”. If that is the purpose of our existence, and we are not in harmonious relationship with God, we are not truly “good”, for we are not fulfilling the purpose for which we were made. Today the Creator calls us out of that problematic situation: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened”, says Jesus, “and I will give you rest… learn from me” (Matthew 11.28). We will find that rest, through Jesus, as we commit to fulfilling His purpose for our lives.

Clive Every-Clayton

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Man’s search for God

Deep in the heart of every human being there is a realisation of God. Helen Keller was a small child, about two years of age, when she became totally blind and deaf. She had a meagre existence, cut off from the outside world, unable either to see or to hear, and her baby vocabulary was inadequate to make her thoughts and her wants known. She endured her existence for a few years, until finally a nurse was engaged who found the way to get through to Helen. It is an amazing true story, but Helen grew up able to talk and live a relatively normal life. At one point in her youth and education she was told about God. This is how she responded: “I always knew there must be a God, but I did not know his name”.

Human attitudes towards that deep-seated notion of God vary between two alternatives. On the one hand, people find it somewhat reassuring to feel that there is a kind-hearted power watching over their daily trials and tribulation, giving hope for a positive turn-out to things. Just to believe that God understands and cares relieves the soul of many worries. On the other hand, there are those who profoundly dislike the idea that a divine power may be watching them constantly, noting their secret sins, hidden from others but not from God.

The first of these two groups of people prefer to think of God as loving and kind; the second have the impression that he is righteous and angry. This second group therefore shun the God they don’t want to believe in, and try in various ways to shut the idea of him out of their minds. They may harden their hearts and plunge into all kinds of evil, dulling the voice of conscience, hoping that this harsh God does not exist. Others remain decent citizens, but calmly side-line God in their thinking; they profess to be atheists or agnostics, so that the perturbing idea of God does not bother them.

Those who recognise within them the hunger for some transcendent reassurance hope that the God who is fairly vague in their imagination does look down in kindness upon them. For them to seek after that God with eagerness of heart, however, is another matter. Some attend worship, without really knowing too much about their God. Others keep him in the background of their minds, in case they ever need some divine help. Some seek God, but fail to find him; he seems distant, absent so they don’t bother too much about practicing any religion.

There is a balance that needs to be found here. If God is not kind and good, he is not worth believing in; if he is not righteous in his holy requirements of us, he has no moral fibre – which means he is not good. When Jesus was teaching about his Father, he revealed BOTH the awesomeness of God’s righteous demands and his eternal just judgment, AND the extraordinary kindness and grace by which he grants mercy, forgiveness, and acceptance to those who turn sincerely to him in trust and repentance.

So both our inner intuitions about God possess some truth. How they cohere in balance is brilliantly seen in the Cross of Christ. He died “for us”: we are, as sinners, under God’s wrath and judgment; but in amazing love the Father sent his beloved Son to suffer the just penalty on our behalf. On that basis God grants mercy and forgiveness justly when we repent and trust our Saviour.

Clive Every-Clayton

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Away with religion?

The New Atheists were dedicated to eradicate religion from any place of influence in society. In this they were following in the footsteps of Karl Marx. Marx’s position is bluntly summed up by Professor Carl Truman, in these terms: “if religion is one major means by which the current unjust set of economic relations is maintained, then at the heart of any drive to transform society must lie a pungent and effective criticism of religion”.

It seems to me useful to discern here a principle that deserves to be exposed. Modern-day atheists, thinking that religion is the root of a lot of evil, attack it tooth and nail. “Religion”, of course, is an easy target to hit, for the word englobes all kinds of, quite honestly, ridiculous world-views with some kind of divinity attached (there are approximately 4,000 religions in the world). So under the heading of “religion”, one can find plenty to validly criticise.

I just want to make two points. The first is to consider where Karl Marx’s anti-religion stance ended up: huge persecution against millions of good-living people who, after suffering immense horrors, saw the collapse and failure of the whole atheistic Soviet enterprise. It is worth considering therefore, whether the modern atheistic attack on “religion” may also harm a large number of essentially decent folk, and also bring about a kind of godless society which, instead of raising the total sum of human happiness, actually brings society down to bizarre and awful horrors. Indeed, are we not already witnesses to the effective decline brought on by the insistence on godless “freedom” where selfishness replaces Jesus’ ennobling call to “deny yourself”, where immorality brings about so many broken homes and broken lives, where children suffer most of all, and antagonism and hatred of others replaces the basic principle essential for a harmonious and positive society – “love your neighbour as yourself”? The godless and religion-less influence we see undermining our erstwhile peaceful and relatively happy society should give us pause for thought.

The second point I want to make was well made by Blaise Pascal three centuries ago when he noted: “I see a number of religions in conflict, and therefore all false, except one” (§198/693). I find that “pensée” very clever. Whereas atheists would say, as they find all kind of religions in conflict, that they throw them all out, Pascal has the genius to see that that does not follow logically: one may – indeed could well be – the true one coming from the one true God. “Religions want to be believed on their own authority”, Pascal adds, and they make threats against those who refuse to believe: “I do not believe them on that account”, he wisely says. “But I see Christianity, and find its prophecies” (numerous fulfilments of biblical prophecies he catalogues in several pages of his Pensées); he concludes, “no other religion can do that!”

Society needs a Transcendent Authority to maintain peace, order, and stability; that authority may come from “religion”. But not just any religion will do. We need a “decent religion” such as even Richard Dawkins recognises Christianity to be. We need the one true religion, the religion that comes from our Creator God, a God who is objectively there and who speaks both wisdom, truth, and goodness into the world he created; not “the god of philosophers and scholars” – as Pascal put it in his Memorial; rather, “the God of Jesus Christ” who transformed the thinker’s life as he submitted to his lordship. That’s what we need, both individually and as a guide to society.

Clive Every-Clayton

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The real truth about human nature

The all-knowing Creator who made humankind “in his image” is the one – the only one – capable of telling us who we really are as human beings. Of course, there are billions of different versions of humans throughout the globe; yet there is a commonality to our humanity that our Creator knows well. His kind wisdom gives us the vital indications we need in order to understand ourselves truly.

These indications, revealed in the Bible, were well grasped by the great French thinker Blaise Pascal, and his “thoughts” are very illuminating on this theme.  He calls people to “know… what a paradox you are to yourself. Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature! Learn that man infinitely transcends man, hear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you. Listen to God. Is it not clear that man’s condition is dual?” 

Pascal encourages humility, which means to consider ourselves according to truth. Pride is considering ourselves as better than we are. Discouragement comes from considering ourselves as worse than we are. Humility strikes the balance, seeking both to assess and to accept the true reality of who we are. And Pascal’s profound insight is to recognise that this our human reality is “dual”. There are two essential sides to our human nature.

 “There are two equally constant truths”, writes Pascal: “one is that man in the state of his creation, or in the state of grace, is exalted above the whole of nature, made like unto God and sharing in his divinity. The other is that in the state of corruption and sin he has fallen from that first state and has become like the beasts. These two propositions,” he concludes, “are equally firm and certain” (Pensée §131/434). It is wisdom for us to recognise both these aspects of our human nature.

Realising how our self-image impacts our mental health, Pascal comments further, “It is dangerous to explain to man how like he is to the animals without pointing out his greatness. It is also dangerous to make too much of his greatness without his vileness. It is still more dangerous to leave him in ignorance of both, but it is most valuable to represent both to him” (Pensée §121/418). So we really need to take on board both features of our reality – our nobleness and our vileness. We are great – the greatest of God’s creation, made in the likeness of God; yet we are perverted, twisted, fallen from our pristine glory. And that is true of you as it is true of me.

A final more amusing thought from Blaise Pascal: “Man is neither angel nor beast, and it is unfortunately the case that anyone trying to act the angel acts the beast”! (Pensée 678/358) He would thus pinprick the bubble of our pride. We are both wonderful, yet wicked; both marvellous and malevolent; both glorious in humanity’s origin and yet tragically fallen from such grace.

So what can we do with this vital double assessment? Realise, first of all, that God does not love you because he finds you perfect, but he loves you in his grace despite your sinfulness. Secondly, when we invite our Saviour, Christ, to come and dwell in our hearts by faith, the Holy Spirit progressively develops within us the desire to overcome our sins and to grow in Christ-likeness. The biblical Christian is encouraged to “put off the old self which… is corrupt through deceitful desires, and put on the new self, remade in the likeness of God in righteousness and holiness” (Ephesians 4.22-24).

Clive Every-Clayton

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Who am I really?

A great thinker of the 20th century, Francis A. Schaeffer, summed up man’s situation thus: “The dilemma of modern man is simple: he simply doesn’t know why man has any meaning. He is lost. Man remains a zero. It is the damnation of our generation. If a man cannot find any meaning for himself, that is his problem”. 

The difficulty was compounded by Jean-Paul Sartre’s insistence that we have to create our own meaning, which contributed to confusion in the search for self-understanding and later to the supposed possibility of inventing one’s identity. The problem with that is we are simply not able to invent ourselves; rather, from the very moment of our birth, we exist as “given”; the wisdom of the serenity prayer counsels that while we should change what ought to be changed, we must accept what cannot be changed. 

We first have to reckon that we come from somewhere; we have a back story. We cannot abolish the past – our past. We are caught in existence at this moment in history.

If we want to re-invent ourselves, we find we drag our past with us and we can never be dissociated from it. Rather, as we seek to understand ourselves properly, we need light to guide us, truth to correct us where we’ve gone wrong. “Know thyself” is not a banal piece of advice: it is of the essence of our happiness and our survival. But that means we have to assess ourselves as we are, as objectively as we can (which is not easy when we are the subject). We have to assess judiciously how other people consider us: we all know how their opinions can do much harm in damaging our self-esteem, and how sometimes their praise does us much good, boosting our morale. In fact, unknown to our own hearts, what we really need is for someone who knows us truly and who loves us dearly, who can tell us who we are, why we are here and what the meaning is to our existence. That person exists! We must listen to him! 

(continued in next blog)

Clive Every-Clayton

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The “endarkenment”

In the Middle Ages, proud intellectual philosophers dared to think that they could find the answers to questions about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything while rejecting the prevailing biblical consensus of the time. That period was called the “Enlightenment”.

After several centuries of intellectual effort the result is one of confusion, humiliation, and the recognition of failure. Having abandoned the wisdom of Jesus who declared that he was “the Light of the world”, philosophers who hoped for enlightenment by their own rational powers ended up plunging the world into hopeless darkness; I call this the “endarkenment”.

The truth is that only the Creator of the whole universe who placed on earth human beings made in his image – only he can enlighten our darkness. “God says: It is I who have made you and I alone can teach you what you are” (Pascal). 

The true enlightenment came when God sent into the world his Son, who proclaimed: “I am the light of the world; whoever follows me shall not walk in darkness but shall have the light of life” (John 8.12). What a claim! The Gospels tell us that he was “the true light which enlightens everyone” (John 1.9). Jesus’ light “shines in the darkness” (John 1.5); but Jesus lamented that “people loved the darkness rather than the light”. Why? Jesus tells us: “because their deeds were evil; for everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed” (John 3.19-20). In other words, Jesus’ light includes moral absolutes; these condemn our sins, and we don’t like that, so we “switch off” the light. That’s why Jesus was rejected and crucified by evil men.

Today, Jesus’ light remains the only ultimate answer to our human predicament, and our refusal to listen to him damns us to remain in our existential darkness.

A powerful passage in the New Testament unveils the deep darkness of our human condition; sadly, we are too proud to envisage its truth. It speaks of all people as “walking in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity” (Ephesians 4.17-19). It takes serious humility to accept such an accurate assessment of our human condition!

Another penetrating and devastating analysis of our human darkness is to be found in the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans. It describes how people “became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools… They exchanged the truth about God for a lie… and… did not see fit to acknowledge God”. Such behaviour brings down God’s holy wrath against us sinners, and the passage shows that an element in that righteous judgment is that God abandons sinful people to their “dishonourable passions”; specifically “women exchanging natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise giving up natural relations with women and being consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error” (v26-27).

In other words, bad thinking leads to bad living. God’s light not only answers our existential questions: it provides moral truth we need, to deliver us from the hellish slippery path of relativistic moral thinking. 

Jesus, however, offers truth and the promise of eternal life.

Clive Every-Clayton

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A better story

I have been busy these last weeks preparing and giving lectures here in the Highlands of Scotland on a better way to conceive of our human reality.

Whether we like it or not, we in the West live in an atmosphere fashioned by a secular mind-set, and through this grid we seek to understand the way people think and behave. Some months ago, certain leading intellectual thinkers, politicians and academics meeting in London insisted that we have not been well served by the modern secular “story” – the worldview beclouding our western society with its morose and unhelpful ideas about our human meaning and value.

These thinkers are proposing a different approach, and although not all would adhere to a religion, there is a basic realisation that without a Transcendent framework, society tends to descend into a kind of hopeless moral relativism that brings on the anguish we see increasingly in the West.

As a Christian, I wholly concur that we need a “better story”, and my lectures have been addressing that need in various areas of our self-understanding. My basic thesis has been that the atheistic materialism underlying the secular story is unhelpful and psychologically damaging. It is a factor contributing to people’s confusion about their human reality, the rise of mental ill health, and the prevailing sense of hopelessness and despair. It is the hidden cause of a lot of the deterioration of our modern society that we have been sadly witnessing these last fifty years or more. 

Why is the materialist-atheist scenario so harmful? Because it proclaims that we all have come ultimately from an impersonal beginning – an immense explosion of energy and matter which, over billions of years, instead of obeying the second law of thermodynamics and deteriorating progressively into total disorder, has somehow managed – by some unaided process – to actually bring about the world we see around us with all its life, variety, beauty, and splendour. The essential blind spot of this “story” is its absence of any original personal Creator as the valorising ground of our human personality.

Dr Francis Schaeffer discerned this years ago, when, commenting on the thesis that “man is the product of the impersonal, plus time plus chance”, he wrote: “no-one has succeeded in finding personality on that basis, though many have tried. It cannot be done”.

This means that if you begin by adopting the atheistic materialist explanation of the origin of all things in an impersonal explosion of matter and energy, there is no way you are going to be able to establish the reality of human personality. That first assumption leads inexorably to an understanding of the human condition which cannot account for – and indeed undermines – all the marvellous enjoyable realities of our personal existence: our intelligence and rationality, our emotional nature, the reality of love, freedom to choose and to exercise our own will, our ability to communicate, and our moral sensitivity. All these much appreciated aspects of our personal lives have no real basis following the story told by secular materialism; it contradicts our well-known reality and would undermine our true personhood. This makes evident the falseness of that story: we know that our personal faculties are real and precious, so any explanation that cannot account for them must be wrong. 

Instead of assumptions that do not explain in positive terms who and what we are – but rather confuse us – what a relief to turn to the “better story” that an infinite and personal Creator made humankind in his image; that both valorises us and truly explains who we really are.

Clive Every-Clayton

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Pride!

Pride is one of the seven deadly sins, but there are two kinds of pride. There is justifiable pride in, say, the successes of a child in studies or sports, or a job well done. But there is the pride that considers oneself above others, that looks down with disdain on what are considered the weaknesses or faults of others, believing in one’s own superiority. That is not a good attitude.

As human beings seek answers to our profound questions, our pride can get in the way of finding the authentic answers we need. We so easily dismiss proposals that call in question our preferred ideas; why? Because we suffer from intellectual pride and we are unwilling to admit we may have got things wrong. 

Why does Jesus call us to be humble and to repent? Because he knows that human pride causes us our own worst problems: it cuts us off from the attitude we should have to enjoy the answers that will give us true fulfilment.

Let me share this gently with you: you will never find the authentic answers you seek unless you humble yourself like a little child and adopt an attitude of openness to receive truth from God himself, brought by Jesus. Otherwise, pride will go before a fall – and a terrible final fall it will be unless there is a change of mind!

Who could ever find a better story, a more desirable vision, a more appropriate worldview? There is nothing to compare with the profound simplicity of the Christian revelation. You will never find anything more life-affirming, love-inspiring, heart-uplifting, soul-stirring, and conscience-cleansing as the message of God’s grace, revealed in his Son, our saviour. We who know the story so well know that nothing can compare with God’s purpose for our lives when we are brought into harmonious relationship with him.

Who could invent anything approaching the sublime profundity and the enriching simplicity of the greatest love-story in the world – the love of Christ for us wayward men and women? The Lord of glory incarnate condescended to be treated on earth by wicked men as the most criminal blasphemer. Why? Because his judges were so blind and proud they couldn’t admit that their judgment on Jesus might be wrong! Jesus humbly came, he said, to serve mankind – and mankind did away with him. Knowing what was going to happen to him, he came “not to be served but to serve and to give his life” to pay the ransom to free us from evil and save us from an eternity in hell. By his horrendous suffering, freely endured on our behalf, he demonstrated unfathomable divine love and compassion for the wicked rebels we were, who deserved his just condemnation. He came to save us from the suffering we deserve, by taking that suffering on himself; only thus could a righteous and just God deliver us from the righteous condemnation that otherwise must fall on us, sinners that we are in his sight.

Where else do you find love like that? Love so amazing, so divine is absolutely unique – and it has been demonstrated once for all in the historic person of Jesus, our Lord and Saviour. And his resurrection proves it must have been of God.

Did you ever realise you were loved like that? Certainly it humbles us to acknowledge our unworthiness and shame; we are so far from deserving love of that kind. Better to humble ourselves and enter into that glorious eternal love relationship that Jesus proposes than to remain proud, stiff-necked, and end up in eternal torment.

Clive Every-Clayton

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